The history of serialize() and unserialize() in PHP begins with Boris Erdmann and me, and we have to go 20 years back in time. This is the day of the prerelease versions of PHP 3, some time in 1998.

Boris and I were working on Code for a management system for employee education for German Telekom. The front side is a web shop that sells classes and courses, the back end is a complex structure that manages attendance, keeps track of a line manager approval hierarchy and provides alternative dates for overfull classes.

In order to manage authentication, shopping carts and other internal state, we needed something that allowed us to go from a stateless system to a stateful thing, securely. The result was PHPLIB, and especially the code in session.inc.

That code contained a function serialize(), which created a stringified representation of a PHP variable and appended it to a string. There was no unserialize() necessary, because serialize() generated PHP code. eval() would unserialize().